Saturday, August 24, 2019

The fever of humid Hoosier summer finally broke yesterday and I’ve
been enjoying the shop today with the windows pushed wide open.

Just now I had to turn off my audible book. As much as I’m enjoying the
novel, the redbird in the burning bush thirty feet outside the window
over my wheel is singing a song far more compelling than Leif Enger’s
words. That’s saying something. Leif Enger is one of my favorite
authors. But, God, how this bird can sing.

This morning the catbird stopped
by for a visit. I was standing at the glass of the shop’s front door
when I saw the little polyglot perched silently in the redbud branch a
mere four feet and a pane of glass away. He dropped down to the
sidewalk and hopped around a bit.

I talked to him. I tried to convince him to stay. I pointed out the
huge maples, the shrubs, the climbing hydrangea – all great places for a
catbird to hang out. Then I confess it – I played the guilt card with
him.

“Look” I said, “I know I threatened to cut it down last
year, but here it still is. I didn’t get rid of it. I saw how you
liked it. You could still, you know, use it.”

I was talking
about the crab apple tree that umbrellas my shop and drops fruit that
makes a general mess of the driveway 8 months out of the year and barely
makes up for that with a week's worth of blooming in Spring.

He
was standing under it. Last year his family used it for nesting. It
seemed to work out well for them. And for my part, I never had such a
great selection of free music since the days of Napster.

I know
it’s past catbird singing season, but I just thought if I could
convince him to stay, he might start to think about this place as his
regular summer home. Free music is something worth fighting for.

Monday, August 5, 2019

It's become one of my favorite drives in this big country -- taking
the cross-country, blue highway drive across Minnesota and Iowa.

The long way home.

Yesterday I followed the storm home (caught up with it just outside
Chicago) and it gave me a light show to beat all. All the way across the
prairie the sun dappled the fields with shafts of light through the
breaking clouds.

If Ireland is green then Minnesota in summer must be Ireland.

There's a beautiful passage not too far south of the Twin Cities where
the highway dips down into the Minnesota River valley and enters a
little town called Henderson (pop. 874).

When life gets hard
enough that I need to go somewhere pleasant in my mind, it will probably
be to Henderson on a summer morning when the fog is still covering the
low ground around the city park by the river, while the 150 year old
brick main street rises above.

Henderson's Andy Taylor will have a
Minnesota accent, but the same slow, deliberate style. The humor won't
make me laugh. It will make me smile. And that for a very long time.

Friday, June 28, 2019

I remember when I got my first cassette player with "Dolby® Noise
Reduction". It was pretty cool. Gone was the hiss of the tape. Gone were
the crackles and pops from the LPs I'd recorded into homemade
cassettes.

But the polish came off that apple pretty quickly.
Gone along with those vanished hisses, pops and crackles were the sounds
of fingers on guitar strings, and breathing woodwind players, and sounds of picks on fretboard ends.

Dolby sucked the life right out of my favorite recordings. Perfect was,
in this case, not perfect. Those extraneous noises were very much a
part of the vitality of the recordings. The noise reduction that Dolby
offered me came at a too high price -- lifeless listening.

Perfection, as a craftsman's goal is admirable. There's a strange
balancing act. Always a balancing act -- achieving an end result that,
in its perfection both appears to transcend the means of its production
-- while at the same time leaving the hint of the humanity behind in the
creation.

Craft has historically thrived when technology is
perceived as a threat to our human expression. Man vs. Machine. The
Steam Drill vs. John Henry romanticism. In this digital age when even
much of our "art" is computer generated, there are still those of us who
aren't ready to give up the hands-on exploration of human trial and
accomplishment.

So, should thrown pottery be perfect?

Yes. In the sense of a craftsman's results coming close to meeting his
intentions, yes. Perfection is a worthy goal. Control the medium. No
excuses.

But just maybe that craft should also be a celebration
of the idiosyncratic material -- clay -- a cussed substance that
doesn't always stay where you put it, warps, shrinks, and cracks when
handled poorly.

And just maybe the marks of the potter's hands
as a reminder that process matters -- matters to lots of us humans --
should not be erased from surfaces, rather, be enjoyed as the part of a
better whole.

It's not about celebrating imperfection or
rationalizing lazy practice. It's not trying to accept a "it's good
enough for..." mentality. The striving should always be there. The
striving should always be evident.

I want my recordings to hiss
and pop if it means I also still hear the squeak of fingers on strings
letting me know that there was a living, breathing human behind the
recording -- a human who was participating in the activity of filling
the world with exciting, beautiful, thoughtful work.

And I want
my pottery to have finger marks, double stamps, bent walls, irregular
trailed lines -- not for their own sake -- not as added affectation to
elicit calculated response -- but as evidence of process. I want those
things that remind me that there was a striving human with lofty goals
willing to risk time, talent, and not a small amount of hope that
he/she'd be putting something of value into our shared world.

Sunday, June 2, 2019

This
is a pretty good metaphor in picture. There's been no bigger
encouragement in my life of creative endeavors than my sister, Jackie,
pictured here letting me out of an antique Wells Fargo trunk.

I'm guessing it's fairly unusual to have a sibling as such an encourager.

I mean, our siblings are the ones we grow up with. Our siblings know our weaknesses better than anyone else in the world does.
They grew up sharing the medicine cabinet in which we hid our
Clearasil, they saw our tantrums, they smelled our gym clothes.

Similarly, our siblings look out at the world from a same shared
perspective that sees all the accomplished, smart, talented, creative
people in the world and measures our collective selves -- our family --
not quite as accomplished, smart, talented, or creative. If you're one
of us, you must be as ordinary as we are.

Our families see the
errors by which we learn. It's hard to see past them. We don't see
those same errors that were the avenue to success in the accomplished
others.

But somehow Jackie heard the 6-8 year-old me tooting
melodies poorly on dad's harmonica and she was the first to buy me a
Yamaha chromatic harmonica of my own.

Somehow Jackie heard the
10-11 year old me stumble through Paul Simon and Peter, Paul, & Mary
songs on a borrowed guitar and heard enough good to think me a
guitarist worth listening to.

And when the only way I could
cope with the rhymes and words and thoughts that crowded my mind as I
worked at the wheel was by typing them into a blog, it was Jackie who
first called me a "writer". And then she even compiled some of my early
musings into a book.

So, yeah, the image of her letting me out
of the trunk is apt. It's a good metaphor. I wish everyone could have
a Jackie in their lives who sees more good than bad in them, who sees
something worth encouraging and nourishing in them, who would tell them
that no matter what else the world was saying about their creative
offerings, there is still at least one person in that world who sees
great value -- and who opens up the trunk for them and unleashes them
on the world.

Saturday, June 1, 2019

I took a break from making these to go across town to the art fair and say hi to my friends exhibiting there.

While there I bumped into Mark. I see Mark once every ten years or so
since we both graduated from college back in the '70s. Odd that in a
town as small as ours I don't run into him more frequently.

Anyway, every time I see Mark I'm prone to wonder about how things might
have been. See, when the potter who gave me my start back in '76 was
looking for an apprentice to help him out, I wasn't the first student he called. Mark was.

When I see Mark I always wonder what I might have become if Mark had
been more interested in making pottery. I might be a rich stock broker
or a famous musician today.

Friday, May 31, 2019

If you spend a lot of time in the woods as I do, you've probably at some point observed a phenomenon I witnessed this morning.

It was early morning, so the sun was just over the horizon, but it was a
curiously burning orange ball. I could see the sun if I looked to the
east and found a break in the forest. Mostly, though, I couldn't see the
sun for all the trees surrounding me.

It was also just late enough in the morning that the sky overhead was a combination of open blue and slightly overcast gray.

As I walked through the woods, almost everything in my field of vision
was lighted cool -- reflecting the blue and gray of the sky above.

But -- and here's the phenomenon I'm talking about -- as I rounded a
bend in the trail, deep in a surround of heavy underbrush was what
appeared to be a glowing-orange campfire blazing.

It wasn't a
campfire. Obviously. But what it was was a small spot of brush that was
being illuminated by the orange sun I could not see. Somehow, through
one small tunnel in all the tree's umbrella and past all the underbrush,
the sun had found a way to light up one small bush in the middle of the
darkest part of the morning forest.

There should be a name for that phenomenon. I'll have to come up with one.

Anyway, curiously that sun is still orange at midday. I'm guessing
there must be something huge going on to the west that has cast debris
way up into the atmosphere. That's what this color sky usually means.

Sunday, May 26, 2019

The world's gatekeepers have lost control of the gates. In some ways
an argument could be made that they served us well. In the examples that
come to mind wherein one didn't get to be a gatekeeper without some
special understanding of the thing he was keeping in or out -- either by
education or seniority or some other meritorious route -- we were
treated to a comfortably homogeneous menu from which we could pick the
already culled servings. If we look at the best offerings on the menu, we conclude the gatekeepers did their job. If we look at the worst offerings, though....

We now live in a time where we can put creative products out to a world
and leapfrog right over the gatekeepers. Josh Turner has done that with
great success. He just started youtubing as a 13-year-old sorta prodigy
and his videos caught on. People have been successfully self-publishing
ebooks. The success rate is low. Josh Turner is one in a billion.

But really, exposure is the name of the game. There are still
gatekeepers, but you're not going to get past them. Really. You aren't.
Maybe you already know that. Maybe you know your song isn't pop enough
for a recording studio to offer you a contract. Maybe you know that your
book isn't of broad enough interest (maybe you write about pottery ;) )) for an actual publisher to take you on. Maybe you aren't going to get your paintings in a reputable NY gallery.

The real gatekeepers still need to make money and you're not their
ticket. The only way you can prove your worth to them and the market is
exposure. And getting exposure has traditionally been a humbling,
grovelling activity.

For some reason it seems to make some of us
feel better to ridicule both the grovellers and the ones trying to give
them a hearing. Maybe such ridicule is a reflexive rationalization for
our own lack of facing that conundrum head on.

Sometimes that ridicule comes framed in the soft language of "Oh, I don't need validation." Well, while that one's being painted, color me skeptical.

Maybe what I'm saying is that the gatekeepers aren't gone. They still
exist and they still matter. But the system is tiered. And your only
hope for getting to the gatekeepers is this grovelling for exposure. Not
many are discovered anymore. Most people grovel. And I think such
grovelling is honorable. It's striving. It's trying.

So, God bless the open mic host.

And God bless the songwriter who walks through the door with a song to
share. He's not seeking fame. He doesn't want to feel important. He
wants to feel real.

Friday, May 24, 2019

Pottery seems to be a bit like speech. It comes in many different
languages -- even different families of languages (just as language has
Romance, Semitic, Indo-European families). And those languages
sometimes break into dialects and accents with their distinct
colloquialisms and conventions.

That's not particularly illuminating. It's obvious really.

What's interesting to me is the degree to which, just as I might enjoy the sound of a language without understanding a word of it, I can enjoy the look of a pot without fully "getting" it.

I can't do a convincing British accent, though I understand the words. Okay, I usually understand the words.

But, unusually, I can affect a reasonably good French accent,
though I don't understand a word of it.

But it's nearly impossible for me to produce a pot I don't understand....though, I don't fully understand the pots I make.

Thursday, May 16, 2019

There’s a laugh we blurt out upon being surprised. And there’s a
laugh we do to keep from crying. We know that one too well. But there’s
even a laugh that springs unbidden from revulsion. Much of modern
comedy goes for that cheap one and counts on our confused emotions to
keep us from sorting the categories sufficiently to realize we’ve been
had. We’re laughing, right? Must be funny then, right?

Maybe. But maybe not really.

Dar was on a trail in the woods and Breeze and
I were about 20 feet away on a parallel trail when I heard her loud,
“Eww!!! “…followed by an uncomfortable laugh. Then she hollered, “Come
here, you gotta see this!”

So Breeze and I cut through the brush and made our way over to Dar’s
side. She was looking down at what appeared for all the world to be the
hind end – butt and tail – of a pine squirrel that had managed to only
get halfway into a hole of safety before getting smashed flat.

That’s what it looked like.

Upon rolling that squirrel half over with my shoe, however, I realized
that it was ONLY the hind end of the squirrel. Some owl or hawk had
been dining on the squirrel high above and had dropped the latter half
to the ground. Serendipity had arranged the optical illusion of the
burrowing squirrel sticking half out of a hole.

Later this same
morning, while walking three abreast on the paved portion of greenway
that parallels the creek just before it flows into Winona Lake, we were
startled by the loud flutter of two mallards – a drake and his missus –
that cleared our heads by only a few feet as they flew past us.

And just as quickly as we saw them fly past, we watched as they pitched
into the creek twenty feet away. In quick succession – one, two, they
hit the water. And they did what I’ve never before seen a duck do.
They hit the water diving.

The creek was high, flowing fast,
and opaque with silt as it had been raining for days. We couldn’t see
the ducks as they dove beneath the muddy surface of the water, but split
seconds later the drake popped to the top.

The missus didn’t.

I kept watching. Waiting.

Still the missus didn’t surface.

I reluctantly walked away. Nothing could be done. But our walk had us
circling back. A half hour later there sat the drake in the same spot
creekside. Waiting.

Try as we might with prose, poem, or song, we could never tell a story as desperately sad or cruel as nature herself tells.

Sunday, May 12, 2019

Life's worthwhile pursuits seem to come with a sufficient covering of that silver
stuff that's on scratch off lottery tickets. Nobody would ever buy a
losing ticket hoping for a winner if it didn't have that silver stuff covering it. And
nobody would attempt to pursue an endeavor if they knew ahead of time
the degree to which they might fail at it.

But we'll pursue
things even if we know we won't be the "best" at it. For one thing, in
the arts there is no "best". There are things like "favorite" and
"successful", but not "best".

And in sports there are so many levels of satisfying achievement that even if there is another participant who is better, there still remains small victories like personal records. There are even those times of elation when you managed to pull together a game that bested those players and courses and games you never before defeated.

In most pursuits I suspect that it's just as Tom Waits sang,
"...the obsession's in the chasing and not the apprehending; the pursuit,
you see, and never the arrest"

So, perhaps it's in the not knowing if we'll fail or succeed that we find the faith to plod on and practice. We can still hope for success and we grow to understand failure as mere stepping stones that lead in new directions.

Saturday, May 11, 2019

I'm still and always mystified by how some people can see or hear or
feel the world in such a way that is something beyond most people's
ability, and can convey that sound, that sight, that feeling --
translate it -- back at us. It's a magician's trick, really.

And I'm at least vaguely aware that just like a magician's trick, it can be learned.

I
first realized this tiered world existed when I was very young. My
first instrument was the harmonica. Without anything but instinct, I
could play melodies on the harmonica. I was immediately aware that I
couldn't play just anything. It had to fit on the harmonica's scale. But
other than that, I could play it.

But then I started to hear
people who could bend notes. That's fine. Explainable, even. But then I
noticed they could improvise a heretofore unheard melody. That's what I
couldn't grasp, and mostly still can't.

On the other hand, when I
first saw my nephew's paintings I had that same sense of someone
improvising on a harmonica. How did this happen? He must have been born
with this vision, right?

....and then I went to the website of
his school. On the one hand, my bubble was burst. It's not that the
process was de-mystified for me. But it was immediately evident that
what appeared to be intuitive or inborn was actually just a skill that
was taught.

And once the skill is taught and caught, the
"miracle" of it gets layer upon layer. Once someone has the requisite
skill, then they can take it in another direction, further from the
root. So, if your first exposure to a work happens to be a leaf, you
will most likely be unaware of limb, branch, trunk, root. It's easy to
believe the leaf was a spontaneous generation. That's what the artist
counts on.

And sometimes having the miracle de-mystified ruins it
for us. Sometimes we'd prefer the magic to the look behind the curtain.
But we're just still dying of curiosity.

Thursday, May 9, 2019

He had such an easy way with clay. Effortless. No apparent strain of muscle or countenance. Watching him at his wheel, it was almost as easy to believe that the wet clay erupted spontaneously up from the wheelhead and his hands just happened to be there as witness to the miracle. His hands appeared not to be shaping, but as the exploring hands of a blind man as he learns contours and textures the only way he can.

I continued to watch as he filled a wareboard with pottery. The illusion never resolved. I continued to see the creator and his creation in reverse order. I continued to see the potter as witness, the pottery as something foregone that had merely leapt into dimension before my very eyes.

Wednesday, May 8, 2019

Last year I mentioned (when it first happened) that I was experiencing a
strange anomaly in my kiln: Cone 11 was melting faster than cone 10. Of
course, it was then falling into cone 10 and keeping it from melting
properly. This happened in both the top and bottom cone plaques.
It had never happened before, though I had fired this very kiln with
that very set-up of cones for almost 30 years.

Even odder? ....it
continued to happen. Since last autumn, every firing has had the same
thing occur. The cones go down in reverse order.

I got by. I know this kiln, and I figured out what to watch and I got by. But I remained curious.

As any potter knows though, problems never present on only one front.
They always come in multiples just to keep life interesting. And this
was no exception.

At the same time the 11 and 10 started acting up, my 010 started breaking off instead of bending.

Strange, huh?

The two things can't be related, right? I mean, they're in the same
firing, so you have to suppose it has to do with where I've set them,
right? Except, as I said, I've fired this same set up for 30 years. Same cones. Now my inner Sherlock starts wondering what, if anything, changed?
Though the two cones' situations don’t seem like they could be the same
factor unless it WAS the kiln placement causing one to break and one to
melt early, right? And, again, that could be it.

But here’s the
strange thing. Against all reason, except the elimination of all other
possibilities – or in the words of Sherlock Holmes himself, “When you
have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable,
must be the truth.”

…the one thing that changed after 30 years of
doing the same thing is this: I made my last set of cone plaques out of
Miller 900. When I make cone plaques, I set up my extruder and then go
about making an entire box (50) of all my cone plaques at one time. I
line up my high fire, my reduction, and my bisque cones and make them
all in one sitting. And I’ve always used whatever stoneware I had on
hand.

Well, up until last year, the stoneware I had on hand was
Standard 153 or Miller 850. Last year I had Miller 900. It was the ONE
thing that had changed. So, finally realizing this, I went about
experimenting to prove this unlikely phenomenon to myself. Yesterday I
put two 010 plaques made with Miller900 in my bisque kiln (something I’d
never done) to see If, in a different kiln, the cone would melt or
break off.

They broke off.

Further, I made new kiln plaques out of Miller 850 to put in my high fire kiln. For the first firing since last Autumn, cone 10 and 11 went down in proper order.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

I wonder what kind of paradise there could ever be in the absence of
contrast? An eternal bliss without struggle? I don't know how that would
work. It sucked for Midas. But then again, life sucked for Sisyphus
too.